‘Doing adoptive family’ in contemporary India – A qualitative exploration of adoptive parents’ narratives

This article discusses adoptive family practices in India, where biological connections are often seen as more important than social ties and legal recognition in building family relationships. It shares insights from a unique, in-depth study of 11 adoptive parents, connecting their experiences to the concept of ‘family practices’. The article highlights two main points. First, it shows thatadoptive families vary in how they create their family lives, especially in response to everyday challenges. These families seek to socially legitimise their understanding of kinship. Second, a continuous process of negotiation and renegotiation is required to create and redefine relationships to demonstrate their familial relationships. While the small group of families studied does notrepresent all adoptive families in India, the findings reveal the complexities of adoptive family life in a contemporary context. This study provides a strong springboard for further research and can improve social work policy and practice

Television, Musical Register, and the Franchise: Continuity and Change

This chapter proposes a model for understanding television music within a broader franchise space, exploring how continuity and change operates both within, and across, television series. Specifically, this framework proposes the concept of a musical register for analysing such musical intertextuality in television and beyond. More specific than genre, a musical register serves as a coherent, but ever-developing musical identity for a franchise. Our concept of register identifies musical practice which is flexible enough to evolve over time but remains sufficiently consistent to serve as a musical thread between fragmented elements of a franchise. This adaptable sonic language can develop alongside changing televisual aesthetics, even traversing media boundaries to film and video games, whilst satisfying fan expectations. Our model accounts for musical connections that are broader and more complex than explicit musical recapitulation, but remain distinctive enough to link texts. As franchises continue to be central to mass-market corporate entertainment strategies, this model illuminates how music serves as part of that creative and business agenda, as well as the implications of franchise music for producers, composers and fans. While this approach is applicable to a wide range of franchise contexts, this chapter will use the case study of the Star Trek television series to illustrate our model of a franchise’s musical register. <br/

The critical group of a combinatorial map

Motivated by the appearance of embeddings in the theory of chip-firing and the critical group of a graph, we introduce a version of the critical group (or sandpile group) for combinatorial maps, that is, for graphs embedded in orientable surfaces. We provide several definitions of our critical group, by approaching it through analogues of the cycle--cocycle matrix, the Laplacian matrix, and as the group of critical states of a chip-firing game (or sandpile model) on the edges of a map.Our group can be regarded as a perturbation of the classical critical group of its underlying graph by topological information, and it agrees with the classical critical group in the plane case. Its cardinality is equal to the number of spanning quasi-trees in a connected map, just as the cardinality of the classical critical group is equal to the number of spanning trees of a connected graph.Our approach exploits the properties of principally unimodular matrices and the methods of delta-matroid theory